House of Mystery Radio Sessions: Women Authors – USA Today Bestseller Ann Charles
- Apr 7
- 4 min read
By Alan R. Warren and Joe Goldberg
Ann Charles is a USA Today Bestselling author who writes hilarious, sometimes hair-raising, award-winning books filled with humor, mystery, adventure, romance, supernatural, and more! She has a B.A. in English (creative writing) from the Univ. of Washington. When she isn't escaping into story worlds filled with rowdy characters, she's arm wrestling her kids, road tripping with her husband, and arguing with her sassy cats.
Interview was originally conducted on November 17, 2026
Ann Charles, with her series “Dig Site Mystery,” has taken a different path: she mixed archaeology with adventure, mystery, and just a hint of the supernatural. The books are following a diverse, often odd but never empty Maya dig in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, one of the country’s great wonders; as the characters try to uncover secrets, they visit many invented “Dig Site” sites as they discover secret stories from both stone and myth. “It’s mystery and adventure and humor and a spark of romance,” Charles wrote. “But then there’s that question that lingers in the back of your mind: is Maya mythology based on real things and people and real events?” Unlike the well-known real-world destinations such as Chichén Itzá that we know and love, Charles creates her own ancient cities.
This is the source of her imagination, which allows her to spin her riddles of her own, far outside what history says has existed. And it keeps her from distorting the reality of place by positioning her stories firmly in a naturalistic cultural fact that has something very much true to the real cultural background. And while that authenticity is based on a lot of research, Charles says, it is a process that can also be fascinating and overwhelming.
“Most of these books take longer than most of my other books,” she says. I learn about the Maya’s beliefs, symbols, wildlife, culture, and even the regional forms of the Maya’s culture. Some animals, like butterflies or vultures, are especially meaningful in some Maya iconography.
Books, documentaries, scholarly papers — all go into her imagination, which then builds a fiction-on-history constructively. Even before she has the inkling of writing, Charles has been submerged in information. By then, the setting feels alive. “The site is sort of a character,” she says. “I have to figure out who lived in that place, what happened there, and why that matters — because Maya cities based in reality tell their own history that we do as a people,” she said. For Charles, location comes first in the creative process. She creates a location survey to see if the fictitious destination belongs to the northern or southern Maya, the geography and time periods that drive architecture, belief, and history.
It’s only under the consideration of the site’s ancient history that she finds her modern characters — and the dangers they face. And each book’s central mystery flows organically from that made-up history. “I say to myself: What was going on here long ago but now archaeologists can see?” she says. And there are also practical archaeological gains, like employing LIDAR technology to locate buried structures among dense jungle canopy, which will occasionally evoke plot concepts and modernize the findings. And while the series is filled with thrills, Charles wants readers to be left with plenty more than just entertainment. “Maya civilization did great things in math, astronomy, and architecture,” she said. “A lot of learning was lost when the Spanish erased their books and disease ravaged people.
If my readers leave my books wanting to dig deeper, that brings me the greatest joy.” The characters, in this multi-layered world, are guides at once. Quint, a photojournalist, serves as the outsider — fidgety with the bugs, humidity, and harsh weather, in order to make him appealing to readers. Helika, too, and her archaeologist dad, are character guides, but not that much or so much, because he needs to give the world experience or knowledge.
In contrast, the heroine Helika and her archaeologist dad offer expertise and light that can translate history and danger, too. Charles likes the figure of Helika’s father. A veteran archaeologist with decades of work under his belt, he provides good humor and calm in dire circumstances. He has an arsenal of other naturalized techniques for considering any structural details of ruins and temples without stalling the pace of our story. The villains get painstaking attention as well. Charles maps the motivation, goals, and internal conflicts of each opposing force. “I don’t want only evil villains trying to be evil,” she says. “The people who know their reason when they do what they are doing, it makes them more multidimensional.” For Charles, the series is especially gratifying. “I invest in the characters,” she says. “I think it’s just different in each series, with its tone/world, and just as long as I’m really excited, as long as I’m reading that there’s more to be had. There’s always more adventures to come, just like hanging out with old friends.” That adventure has been layered with layers of history, myth, and jungle vines in the “Dig Site Mysteries,” where the past is also ever really buried.
Full Interview: Ann Charles - Chewed Up By The Jungle - House of Mystery Radio on NBC | Acast
House of Mystery is an electrifying weekly radio program hosted by Canadian author and broadcaster Alan R. Warren, airing on the NBC News Talk Radio network and syndicated across the US and Canada. Through insightful interviews with acclaimed authors, experts, and cultural figures. With a rich mix of fiction and non-fiction topics
Alan R. Warren is an award-winning Canadian true crime author and broadcaster whose work has captivated readers and listeners across North America. With more than three dozen books published. He is also the long-time host of the popular House of Mystery radio show on the NBC News Talk Radio network.
Joe Goldberg is the award-winning thriller author. He was a government and corporate intelligence officer. Joe is a college instructor in digital communications. He resides near Chicago, most likely cooking and listening to Jimmy Buffett music.
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